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% Community Member Spotlights

ince August 2009, Cheng Wang has been employed by Nokia Mobile Phones, a company that was twice nominated Member of the Year by the JCP community (2008, 2005). Cheng is now the Feature software head in the Java development area of Nokia. In previous years, he has also worked for Motorola, BenQ, and Siemens - all active members of the JCP community at one time or another.

Cheng's interest in Java technology was ignited specifically in 2002, when he was working at Siemens on a Personal Information Management (PIM) implementation of JSR 75, PDA Optional Packages for the J2ME Platform. However, it wasn't until June 2012 that he has been able to participate directly in the JCP program. Now he represents Nokia on the Executive Committee. He is also the Maintenance Lead for several Nokia-led JSRs.

Cheng completed a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Beijing University of Technology (1992). He lives in Beijing, China, where he enjoys spending time with his young son.

Chris Vignola works for the IBM AIM Software organization and is the Lead Architect for WebSphere Systems Management. He has over 28 years of industry experience in the architecture and development of software systems, including WebSphere Extended Deployment, WebSphere Application Server, and the Multiple Virtual Storage (MVS) operating system. Chris led the architecture and design for the operational facilities of MVS Sysplex, was a charter member of the WebSphere Application Server for z/OS team, specializing in EJB container and systems management components, and more recently led the WebSphere Compute Grid development team.

IBM is a valued member of the JCP community, twice nominated JCP Member of the Year (2011, 2004). Chris represents IBM in serving as Spec Lead of JSR 352, Batch Applications for the Java Platform. An interest in object oriented programming and virtual machines first prompted Chris to get involved with Java technology. He has since become "passionate about modernizing traditional programming models, such as batch, in the context of Java because proven techniques and modern language technology is a powerful combination." IBM rewarded his passion with the Outstanding Technical Achievement award for advancing the state of the art on Java Batch.

Chris speaks about these topics at conferences such as JavaOne in San Francisco, California, and IBM Impact in Las Vegas, Nevada. He has written several articles about the WebSphere Compute Grid and Web Services, which are available from his Google homepage along with a list of the ten US patents he holds. Chris was a contributing author to the three books listed on his site: Secrets of SOA, WebSphere System Administration (Appendix A), and Professional WebSphere Application Server. He graduated with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from the State University of New York (SUNY) in 1985.

Chris speaks English and Spanish fluently, lives in NY state, and enjoys spending time with his family, skiing, hiking, and fishing, when not fully immersed in delivering industry-changing technology.

Marina Vatkina is a Principal Member of the Technical Staff at Oracle Corporation, formerly Sun Microsystems. She first got involved with Java technology when she was working on a Sun software product called Java Blend, whose goal was to equip programmers with a tool for developing business applications entirely in the Java language without needing to know much about relational databases or Structured Query Language (SQL).

During the last ten years Marina has been responsible for several areas in the implementation of Sun's - now GlassFish's - Java EE application server, including persistence, transaction manager, and the EJB container. Her technical focus relates to Java EE server-side technologies, and she has shared her enthusiasm with the Java community when blogging and speaking at the JavaOne conference.

Marina is currently the Spec Lead for JSR 345, Enterprise JavaBeans 3.2. She is also an Expert with the newly restarted JSR 236, Concurrency Utilities for Java EE. She holds a Masters degree in Applied Math and Computer Science from MIIT, a university in Russia. For fun, she enjoys cooking and tasting good food, travelling when she has time, listening to classical music, and going to art museums.

Mitch Upton is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle, working in the Fusion Middleware Webservices team as the lead engineer for fundamental technologies such as reliable messaging, clustering, and persistence. He represents Oracle within the JCP program, serving as Spec Lead of JSR 350, Java State Management.

Previously, before joining Sun, now Oracle, in 2008, he represented BEA as a member of the Expert Group for JSR 112, J2EE Connector Architecture 1.5, as well as for the privately co-developed (non-JCP) Enterprise Metadata Discovery specification with IBM. In the application integration space, Mitch holds some exclusive US patents and many co-invented patents. Other projects throughout his career include designing a J2EE-based human workflow product and application integration product, an automated process flow engine, a high speed Online Transaction Processing (OLTP) system for tracking customer account activity, and a client/server system to assist in tracking projects and billing customers.

Java technology first got Mitch's attention when he was asked to write a user-interface toolkit that could be used on multiple platforms. He says, "Java was a natural fit. The cleanliness of the language along with built-in threading made it instantly invaluable in this effort." He is committed to developing APIs that clearly and succinctly reflect how a customer wants to work with features he writes. "Java offers a very clean and highly expressive set of language elements and utilities that makes this possible," he says. Moreover, Mitch recommends using off-the-shelf components rather than reinventing the wheel, and the Java language supports that. He says, "No other language offers the wealth of standard APIs and open-source implementations that Java does."

Mitch co-wrote the WebLogic-focused chapter in J2EE Connector Architecture and Enterprise Application Integration (2001), by Rahul Sharma, Beth Stearns, and Tony Ng. Mitch holds a bachelor's in Physics from the University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado (1989). He lives nearby in Denver, where he telecommutes to work. To take a break, he works on hot rods as an amateur mechanic and goes camping or does other outdoorsy activities.

As a Senior Research Assistant in the Secure and Correct Systems Group, Ronald Toegl is employed by IAIK of Graz University of Technology, in Graz, Austria, where he is pursuing a doctorate. His research interests include IP-based communications, formal methods in security APIs, and protocols for Trusted Computing.

Ronald represents IAIK in serving as Spec Lead for JSR 321, Trusted Computing API for Java. JSR 321 is the Java specification that allows software developers to access a hardware Trusted Platform Module (TPM) and provides them with a compact, high usability interface. It is based on the functionality of the TPM Software Stack specification of the Trusted Computing Group. Related lab exercises were used in European Trusted Infrastructure Summer School (ETISS) and published in academic workshops and Wiley's Software: Practice & Experience journal. Ronald and his Expert Group, which includes academicians and individual members, have been fully committed to developing and maintaining the now-released standard with as much transparency as possible. The JSR 321 page on the jcp.org site propels readers to a second website, where people can participate in the development and access the latest drafts of the source code.

The JCP community nominated JSR 321 Most Innovative JSR in 2011. The previous year, Ronald was named Outstanding Spec Lead, with the comment, "With his passion and continuous effort he not only brought JSR 321 to EDR stage despite a more than challenging time, but he also inspired companies to adopt the JSR and implement against it already." He had also been nominated for the Most Outstanding Java SE/EE Spec Lead award the year before.

Ronald's work has been published as proceedings of numerous professional conferences, in articles of journals including Journal of Supercomputing, and through live presentations all over the world (Austria, France, Germany, Hungary, China, Korea, and the United States). Ronald is fond of globe-trotting, skiing, history, and electronic music.

Manik Surtani is determined to make "technology work for mankind" and not the other way around. He co-founded a startup in 1998, building online knowledge-exchange systems. As the systems, originally built in PHP and C, grew more complex, the need to transition to Java became obvious. The advantages included tooling, rich libraries, active and healthy community of developers, and a burgeoning collection of open source application servers and runtimes. Manik fell hard for the technology, becoming a Java EE consultant for five years, working mainly on mission critical highly available systems.

Manik became Lead R&D Engineer at JBoss for a year before Red Hat, Inc. acquired the company in 2006. That same year, Manik joined the JCP program to become an Expert Group member for JSR 107, JCACHE ? Java Temporary Caching API, and, much later, Spec Lead of JSR 347, Data Grids for the Java Platform. Now a Senior Principal Software Engineer at JBoss/Red Hat, Manik is founder and project lead of Infinispan, an open source data grid and cloud storage platform, and of Red Hat's related Enterprise Data Grid product. He co-founded JClouds, a multi-cloud portability library for Java, was lead engineer on JBoss Cache, and was a core contributor on a number of other JBoss products, including JGroups, and the clustering and high availability features in the JBoss Application Server, Hibernate. Infinispan, JBoss Cache, and JGroups are core building blocks to many Java-based clustering solutions. Manik is also a committee member of the London Java Community (LJC), a large, active JUG.

Manik holds several patents, most of which are in the area of distributed computing. He has a BSc, with first class honors, in Computing, from the University of Wales, Swansea (1997). Although his academic background involved research in artificial intelligence and neural networks, his current interests lie in cloud and distributed computing, autonomous systems, and highly available computing. He is a champion of open source processes. His Devoxx 2010 presentation on "Hacking Infinispan" is available on Parleys.com. Manik communicates through a homepage, a blog, and Twitter @maniksurtani. For fun, he climbs mountains, rocks, and frozen waterfalls.

Bill Shannon is an Architect at Oracle, where he has worked since 1982. In the early years, he worked on the JavaMail API, the HotJava Views product, the Common Desktop Environment, the Solaris operating system, and all versions of SunOS. In more recent years, Bill became one of the primary architects of Java EE. Within the JCP program, he served as Spec Lead to revise the Java EE specification, leading JSRs 58 (Java EE 1.3), 151 (Java EE 1.4), 244 (Java EE 5), 316 (Java EE 6), and 342 (Java EE 7). He has also acted as Maintenance Lead to update his earlier work through JSR 904, JavaMail Specification; JSR 919, JavaMail; and JSR 925, JavaBeans Activation Framework 1.1.

By June 2005, Bill was awarded Most Outstanding Spec Lead for Java Standard Edition/Enterprise Edition at the annual JCP Awards ceremony. He earned this distinction for his technical acumen, his ability to build consensus among Experts who may not share identical goals, and his efficiency in guiding the development process. He was also inducted into the original Star Spec Lead Hall of Fame.

Bill graduated from Case Western Reserve University with an MS in Computer Engineering in 1980. Case is a private research university in Cleveland, Ohio that shapes "renaissance" students who are well grounded in science, technology, and liberal arts. After moving to California, Bill took up bicycling, which helps him unwind.

At Oracle, Craig L Russell is an Architect specializing in Java persistence for enterprise systems. He is currently in the MySQL Cluster group primarily responsible for ClusterJ, the high-performance, easy-to-use Java interface for MySQL Cluster. He is currently working on a Javascript interface to MySQL and MySQL Cluster.

Within the JCP program, Craig is the Spec Lead for JSR 12, Java Data Objects (JDO) Specification, and JSR 243, Java Data Objects 2.0 - An Extension to the JDO specification. He leads the implementation team for JSR 243, which is creating the JDO API and TCK. He was the architect of the Container Managed Persistence component of the J2EE Reference Implementation and of Sun Java System Application Server.

Craig is a Member of the Apache Software Foundation, a member of the Apache Incubator project responsible for bringing projects into Apache, and the Secretary of the foundation.

Craig holds a BA in Applied Mathematics from Harvard University (1970-71). His book, Java Data Objects, 2003, O'Reilly, is available at Amazon. He speaks at conferences such as O'Reilly's OSCON, JAX, Oracle Open World, JavaOne, and Oracle Collaborate.

John Rose is a consulting engineer at Oracle, working on the OpenJDK project. He started working on Java technology at Sun Microsystems in 1997, contributing widely to functionality and performance of the JDK stack. The variety of his past projects includes inner classes, the initial port of HotSpot to SPARC, the Unsafe API, profile-driven JIT optimizations, JVM metadata tuning for object processing, scripting language design and implementation, and Pack200 application compression. As a longtime member of the HotSpot compiler group, John has enjoyed participating in numerous JIT improvements that have helped make HotSpot a premier foundation for productive programming. Before joining Sun, John worked on dynamic and hybrid languages, including Common Lisp, Scheme ("esh"), and dynamic bindings for C++, as well as compiler advanced development. Still earlier he invented (with Guy Steele and Stephen Wolfram) the C* parallel language at Thinking Machines.

The JCP community named John Outstanding Spec Lead 2011 for "his excellence in ensuring consensus across the community -- both EG members and the wider JVM language community." He had previously been nominated for this honor in 2008 as well. Within the JCP program, John co-led JSR 200, which successfully standardized and improved a hyper-compression algorithm. As a member of the JSR 241 Expert Group, he contributed a semi-formal grammar to the Groovy scripting language. Most recently, as Spec Lead for JSR 292, he worked on specifying new support in the JVM standard for dynamic invocation and related facilities. JSR 292 won the JCP distinction Most Innovative JSR 2011 and Most Innovative Java SE/EE JSR 2006. John is founder of the Da Vinci Machine Project, which includes the Reference Implementation for JSR 292, as well as other more experimental JVM features to serve the needs of programming language implementors.

John blogs and speaks at technical conferences, including JavaOne, Oracle JVM Language Summit, and Microsoft Lang.NEXT. He has published several papers on invokedynamic, the JVM, and other topics for Principles and Practice of Programming in Java (PPPJ), Virtual Machines and Intermediate Languages (VMIL), Java Grande/ISCOPE (JGI), and other conferences. He holds two US patents, #6996825 "Method and apparatus for efficient object sub-typing," and #6711576 "Method and apparatus for implementing compact type signatures in a virtual machine environment."

John has a bachelor's in Mathematics with honors and a second bachelor's in English with honors, both from University of California, Santa Barbara, California (1983). He is a part-time high school teacher of Intellectual History. His appetite for learning is insatiable, luring him into history, literature, language, mathematics, physics, philosophy, and theology. He and his kids take turns playing on the piano, and he even goes outside for an occasional walk.

Dr. Mark Reinhold is Chief Architect of the Java Platform group at Oracle. His past contributions to the platform include character-stream readers and writers, reference objects, shutdown hooks, the NIO high-performance I/O APIs (JSR 51), library generification, and service loaders. Mark was the lead engineer for JDK 1.2 and 5.0 and the Spec Lead for Java SE 6 (JSR 270) and Java SE 7 (JSR 336). He currently leads the Jigsaw and JDK 8 projects in the OpenJDK Community, where he also serves on the Governing Board, and he is the Spec Lead for Java SE 8 (JSR 337). Mark holds a PhD in computer science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Several years ago, the PMO recognized Mark's contributions by inducting him into the Star Spec Lead Hall of Fame. Then, in 2011, the JCP community nominated Mark Outstanding Spec Lead "for his leadership and promotion of the first Java SE platform JSR in several years."

Mark speaks regularly at conferences, including Devoxx and FOSDEM in Belgium and JavaOne in San Francisco. See videos of his talks on Parleys.com, or follow him on his blog or Twitter feed @mreinhold.